GMO'd Vegetable seeds?

I just got a Vegetable Grower magazine in the mail. There is an article on food safety. Of course the government is involved. Some of the rules are completely ridiculous. So down the line when food gets to expensive to buy, you can blame discussions like this where the people don't have a clue what they are talking about.

Minnesota had Timber Wolf season last fall. The wolves are getting to thick. Now some activists are up in arms & may get it stopped for future years. This news comes right along with why the Moose population has declined at an alarming rate lately. Is it possible the over supply of wolves are hungry ?

Fish. Do you know what you are talking about ? We have a nice lake a few miles from here. You are supposed to eat only so many fish a year out of it, because they have a high level of Mercury. After years of testing they can't figure out why.
Anybody eat Talapi ? Most of what is sold here is farm raised in China. Smog is number 1 product of China. Do you suppose the fish could be contaminated by the chemicals in the smog ?
I saw a TV thing the other day about raising some kind of Bass in the desert in California. They ship out about 80,000 lbs a week. I don't think there are to many pollutants in a desert. But this is farm raised fish.
Like I said earlier, don't jump to conclusions you have no basis for.

I don't buy any farmed raised(PBS special awhile ago on the nasty farm raised fish business) but then there are some areas of problems with wild caught
Was talking with a friend who works for the state dep, she said to stay away from any wild caught near Japan or Thailand(still effects from the tsunami) by the Jersey shore(cause of Hurricane Sandy there were TONS of petroleum swept into the ocean) but she told me on the qt, the gov't is not going to tell you any of that!

Well said Mr Ernie and you to country Gardens

ROUNDUP DISCUSSIONS.

I am sure there are many readers of this forum that see the benefits of using Roundup, but have some reasonable apprehension about the long term effect of using it.

I have happened to have considerable experience with repeated use of it, and can document the effect it had on the soil with pictures. I do not write this trying to change anyone's mind, but simply to inform those that would like to learn more about this.

I started and operated a Shade and Ornamental tree nursery in Idaho for fifteen years and have closely watched the operation for another 15 years. The trees were grown out for an average of 5 years, and when harvested, due to logistical reasons, the next crop was planted in the same row space. Weeds cannot be controlled around trees with mechanical cultivation, and hiring labor to hand weed 30 miles of tree row is impractical, so i started using Roundup, which, in the early 80's was a fairly new product and no one knew much about it.

The pictures i will show you are of these tree rows that had been sprayed every year, as many times as was needed, to control the weeds. The trees being grown now are growing the same as the earlier crops of trees grew. So, you can see for yourself that Roundup, Commercial strength, does not in itself, sterilize the soil. We would have regrowth of weeds in the tree rows, without the soil being disturbed every year until the trees were harvested.

My experience with 2 4 D, which we used to completely kill the weeds under the New Zealand type electric deer fence, did seem to be sterilizing the soil, as weeds stopped sprouting in some areas.

The trees shown in the pictures are 3 to 5 years old.

Roundup is a systemic herbicide. I don't want it in my food!

It kills anurans in ponds and other marshy environments. See

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-04/uopm-rhl040105.php

Who knows what it may do long-term to other species. I don't want it in my food either. Yet GMO crops allow more Roundup to be sprayed...

Spraying RU around ornamental trees to kill weeds is a totally different thing then injecting it into our food, I don't want it in my food either!

Flo,
I was not addressing you ladies that seem to relish living in fear, i was responding to the members that had expressed concern about some weedkillers sterilizing the soil.

I am an old man, soon to be 87 years old, and in that long life span i have seen many friends and acquaintances die, some from Cigarettes, Cheap whiskey, Accidents, Heart attacks, Diabetes, etc, but not one of them have died from the Love Canal nonsense, Global Warming, GMO, Green house gases, or any of those things that some people seem to be so afraid of.

So, i admit i am a bit skeptical of the threat of all these looming disasters that you read about and refer to, in the Fringy press.

But, i believe you have the right to do what you want to, as long as it does not actually harm anyone else, just like Monsanto has the right to do what it wants to, as long as they do not harm anyone else.

Peace,
Ernie

Ernie you don't know me. I don't live in fear at all, but I do like to be educated on what this country allows to be done to our food

If you want to talk about weedkillers then start another thread this thread is a discussion about GMOs

Flo,
I was responding to another person in this thread, about the effects of Roundup sterilizing the soil when used on GMO soybeans , but i agree it is off subject, so i apologize.

Ernie - I gather from your posts that you don't care what happens to future generations of humans. It might take two or three generations for the ill effects of GMO's to be discovered.

Global warming is here and now, not when you and those of your generation were young. It is future generations that will suffer the consequences.

Only those who lived in the Love Canal area would have been affected, not anyone else!

I don't have grandchildren, but I do care about the young people who will inherit this home we call Earth.

No I'm sorry, I should know by now that here at Dave's we never stay on topic

I came across something the other day that wheat was being hybridized & whatever 2000 years ago. Shouldn't everyone died by now from the effects of that ?

I know that you know that hybridization isn't the same thing as GMOs. So why would you say that?

To recap what I said above just in case you're not sure or you missed it:

"The term "genetically modified" refers to changes imposed through scientific intervention which insert traits into organisms that would never develop there through natural evolution, such as adding Bt to corn or genes from one species into the DNA of another. I'm surprised you're not aware of this distinction, but it's the in-the-lab DNA meddling that people are concerned about, not the sort of breeding programs that produce different strains of dogs or petunias, nor the sort of natural evolution that produced Homo sapiens."

Honeybee,

I do have grandchildren as well as great grand children, and i certainly do not want them to live a life of dreadful fear of things that almost certainly will never happen. I recall seeing a generation of little kids that were taught to hide under their desks and be terrified of Atom Bombs that never fell. I thought people that deliberately scared those little kids were guilty of child abuse.

Love Canal symbolizes the start of the entire Fearful Future Industry. just like the Spotted Owl is the symbol of all the useless economic damage that has been done by the Eco Nuts.

And yes, i do remember this thread is supposed to be about GMO and not Grand children.

Ernie

2000 years ago they were doing what is now called GMO, they just hadn't come up with the clever name.

In 13AD they worked in labs with chemicals? really?

When i Genetically Modified the Organism commonly known as a Crabapple tree, i did it accidently with a budding knife. But it disturbed and rearranged the genes in that plant and produced a new and improved variety, instead of the expected clone. And my laboratory was the field, where much of the work on the soybeans is conducted.

So, that variety of crabapple, being resistant to many of the common diseases that Malus are susceptible to, is just as much a GMO as a Roundup resistant Soybean plant.

And there is absolutely no reason why the same thing could not have been done 2000 years ago.

What we really need to decide this debate, is just a little bit of actual proof that people are dying from the modified Soybeans.

Ernie

Rick, Go ahead and complete the introduction if the Thread master will allow.

I see it has long been used to treat Gout, and is now being used to treat fever, so although it is called toxic, it seems to have some benefical uses. But not having had gout, i am not familiar with it.

Ernie

Obviously there are those here who know the difference between hybridizing and genetically engineering!

No matter what you call it I want food that has been genetically engineered labeled

Honey,

I am sure we all know the difference, between hybridizing and genticic engineering, as well as when the term overlaps. I believe it was Farmer Dill that explained the Soy Bean program consists of choosing the plants that show resistance to mild doses of Roundup, and then breeding those plants back. And if that is true, which i believe it was, it sounds identical; to the way we did Breed Improvement on New Zealand Coopworth Sheep. Pick the strongest and breed them back.

But one of the major underlying problems with food labeling is the economic fact that only a few thousand people want it labeled, but the rest of the 130 million people have to pay for it. I forget the exact estimate, but it was millions and millions of dollars it was projected to cost, just in California, but the supporters missed the chance to step forward and offer to pay for what they want. They want all of us to pay for something they want, but we do not feel the need for.

Everything costs money, and we should be prepared to pay for those things we want.

Ernie

Just like organic foods. They all want it but whine when it comes time to pay. Around here organic food is just about twice the price of regular food.

Ernie said:
>> Go ahead and complete the introduction

LOL! I was still working on the Preface - no, the Abstract. ;-)

People who don't like long posts should skip ahead with the page down key.

rjogden said:
>> Imagine the poor guy who discovered how to control fire. "You're gonna burn yourself". "It's smoky". "It smells bad". "It makes the food taste funny". "It's too dangerous".

I'm willing to take the other other side ... that "fire" stuff IS dangerous! The smoke alone ...

You reminded me of the beach party cookout held by the Nutrition and Food Science department while I was an undergrad. All these top-shelf PhDs were grilling hot dogs over a smoky charcoal fire that had been started with hydrocarbon lighter fluid.

They started talking about their research projects, like:

- the very potent carcinogens and downright toxins in the N-nitrosoamine family, created from nitrites when heated in combination with protein, pretty much the definition of hot dogs.

- carcinogens in polycyclic hydrocarbons (charcoal lighter fluid)

- carcinogens from incomplete combustion, like soot and PAH in smoke

- the way caffeine potentiates many carcinogens, at least in tissue culture (Coca-Cola and coffee)

When one of the grad students (perhaps the vegetarian) pointed out that they were demonstrating everything they were studying, they roared with laughter, agreed, and kept on living.

They had a sense of the magnitudes of the risks, and strongly expected Cambridge air and traffic to kill them long before the nitrites and smoke.

But they ate scorched nitrite-preserved meats INFREQUENTLY to keep the dose and the risks down - the risks of cholesterol and bad ground meat and, oh yes, the chemical carcinoigens too. The dose makes the poison.

I don't think any of them were smoking cigarettes: the risk of that was high enough to be an objective concern when they looked at the numbers, so there were ex-smokers but few or no smokers. High risk, take action.

And they were darn careful when they handled radio-isotopes, acids, bases, dieing mice and aflatoxin. And careful when they crossed the street and matched their reflexes against motorists who seemed to think "one point for undergrads, two for grad students, and three for post-docs". More risk, more care.

They had a sense of perspective. If they had worried about increasing a one-in-50,000 chance of something up to one-in-40,000, they wouldn't have been able to face the REALLY dangerous parts of their jobs (or life) at all.

Maybe people who don't want to take any risks, reduce any possible risk, or want food to be pure or natural or organic by some definition, are smarter than the N&FS PhDs. Seriously, maybe that is more rational.

Would a statistician find that they lived measurably longer? I doubt it.

Are they any healthier in some way? Maybe. If they have LESS mental stress from knowing they've reduced their body's load of pollution by 20%, yes probably they are healthier. If they've INCREASED their mental stress levels by worrying about every aspect of life that is less natural than it was 100 years ago, probably not.

Drifting again, here's a fairly strongly held belief of mine: NONE of our grandchildren will ever complain about the way we allowed our food supply to become unnatural. They will be much too busy bitterly cursing our stupidity and short-sightedness for allowing climate change to make their world really hellish. There is one danger that isn't 1-in-50,000. Wars may go back to being global in scope as each region goes through periods of not being able to feed their population with or without GM tools. Maximum risk, put our heads in the sand and pretend it will just go away.

YMMV.

Rick,
That was a good story, and i do not mind long posts, but the introduction i was looking for was how the "Colchichine" you mentioned is used to modify genetics. Google indicated it kills the gout without killing the goutee, but did not mention in the part i saw about its effect on genes.

Ernie

Someone else must have posted about Colchicine. Isn't it used to make tetraploid or polyploid plants? Blocks chromosome separation during meiosis? Very toxic. Brutal stuff.

My definition of "genetic engineering" or "genetic modification" is very narrow. You can use the words any way you want, but it's useful to have a shorter way to say "Agrobacterium plasmid-mediated transformation of plant cells with DNA 'engineered' using techniques including sequencing, recombinant DNA methods, polymerase chain reaction (and others developed since around 1960)".

The field exploded when certain tools were invented, so I make a big distinction between GE / GM and the last 10,000 years of plant breeding. Until plasmids and Agrobacterium were used, breeding was just a million times slower and random.

Compared to the modern power tools, breeding and hybridization are in a different ballpark - a different continent. Not on the same planet, re4ally. Once they got the plasmid vector working on plants, the flood gate (or Pandora's Box) was open.

(The "gene gun" was more recent and clumsy despite its cutesy names "bioballistics" and "biolistics". But it does "count" as GE because Agrobacterium doesn't work on every plant species, and it can shoot the same plasmids. Much less efficient than Agrobacterium, but hugely better than anything else. Honest, a modified Crosman air pistol was used first, to shoot little tungsten particles coated with engineered plasmids. Then they used a nail gun cartridge to accelerate plasmid-laced tungsten powder. Hokey, and lame, right? Old school compared to Agrobacterium.

The Agrobacterium has always been able to splice some of its own DNA into plants. I think it makes a tumor or gall or some kind of plant wart. Agrobacterium has a few plasmids (small mobile sections of DNA that can go a'wandering). I think they are circular. Anyway, they have evolved to be very good at infecting plants.

So when geneticists figured out how Agrobacterium did it, they started using it as a shortcut. They piggy-back on the Agrobacterium plasmid, and let the bacteria do their DNA insertion for them. It's thousands of times more efficient than anything they came up with themselves.

So in that sense, GE or GM is "natural" - it uses a plasmid and a bacterium that have been around longer than agriculture.

But the bacterium is like a hypodermic needle. The transgenic and Frankenstein aspects come in when they modify the plasmid with DNA from species other than the target plant.

Geneticists already had enough tools that they can splice and dice the plasmid DNA, removing most of what they don't want, but keeping the initiator and terminator regions (not that kind of Terminator, we hope). Those regions let the plasmid infect the plant DNA. Then they splice in the "other" DNA that they want to play with, like a group of genes that make Vitamin A, or a toxin to kill insects.

They usually splice in a "select-for-me" gene like antibiotic resistance. They replicate or "amplify" the modified plasmid and slip it back into the Agrobacterium. Then they mush together plant cells and the Agrobacterium. Wait for a few of the bacteria to do their thing and infect some plant cells. The they call all the UNtransformed plant cells by adding antiobiotic. Any plant cells lacking the "select-for-me" gene die. What is left is mostly transformed plant cells.

If the plasmid carried in the antibiotic resistance gene, it probably alos carried in the genes they wan ted to fool around with. Now they grow the transformed plant cells back into plants, and Abra-ca-dabra, FrankenPlant.

THAT's what "genetically modified plants" means to me.. Plasmid-mediated transformation of plant cells with 'engineered' DNA.

With these power tools, geneticists "know enough to be dangerous". They can do in a few days what plant breeders could try for years or centuries to do randomly (even if they knew about what Agrobacterium can do, they didn't have the tools to dice and splice DNA to order.

Rick Corey,
It looks like we got the Rick and the Rich mixed up here. It was Rich that mentioned Colchichine modified genes, but did not say how it did that, and apparently when i followed up on that, to ask him to elaborate, I modified the Rich into Rich, causing a bit of confusion here.

Ernie

Interesting description of what "genetically modified plants" (or, I assume, animals) means to you. I don't know if that will sink in with those who think it's identical to hybridization and long-term breeding programs - or natural selection - but you definitely gave it the old college try.

Without that common understanding of terminology there is really no point discussing this any further, so I won't.

Thanks, Rick, your explanations are always so much better than my own. :)

Those who either don't understand, or refuse to understand, the difference between hybridizing and engineering will not be swayed, so I will leave them to their ignorance, and quit the discussion!

I still want GMO's labeled!

GG,

It may be as well that you drop out since you seem to be solely focused on the Mad Scientist in the white Lab Coat that you think is out to kill you.

No one denies the actual Splicing has to be done in the Lab, but the two parts of DNA have to be produced first. They do call it gene splicing or combining for a reason.

Ernie

Ernie, that is rude. I have been polite and you need to do the same.

GG,

I found some of your comments and criticisms unduly harsh, and was trying to return tit for tat, but i certainly do not want to be thought of as rude, so i apoligize.

I have been wanting to escape from this discussion for some time, so lets part friends and drop the subject.

Kindest regards,
Ernie

Thanks, Ernie.

A person who works at a company that does genetic (chemical kind) modification, would either defend them (to keep a paycheck coming in) or they'd quit (due to knowing you are contributing to people's misery and death) and find another job elsewhere.

Findings of the effects of genetic (chemical, not hybridazation or natural) modification was published in The Food & Chemical Toxicology Journal and was just presented at a news conference in London.

Labels are not a bad thing. Other countries label them, so why don't we?

Findings from the study
Here are some of the shocking findings from the study:

• Up to 50% of males and 70% of females suffered premature death.

• Rats that drank trace amounts of Roundup (at levels legally allowed in the water supply) had a 200% to 300% increase in large tumors.

• Rats fed GM corn and traces of Roundup suffered severe organ damage including liver damage and kidney damage.

• The study fed these rats NK603, the Monsanto variety of GM corn that's grown across North America and widely fed to animals and humans. This is the same corn that's in your corn-based breakfast cereal, corn tortillas and corn snack chips.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/037249_GMO_study_cancer_tumors_organ_damage.html#ixzz2O5QfN89P

http://www.thegrocer.co.uk/topics/technology-and-supply-chain/monsanto-weedkiller-and-gm-maize-in-shocking-cancer-study/232603.article

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2205509/Fresh-fears-GM-foods-French-study-finds-rats-fed-controversial-crops-suffered-tumours-multiple-organ-failure.html